A Social Networking Site Portable Profile System for Blind and Visually Impaired Users Based on Cloud and Semantic Web Technologies

While the potential benefits of the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary within the context of facilitating Social Networking Site (SNS) user profile portability have been broadly discussed, the potential benefits for users with visual impairments have been overlooked. Previous studies have identified SNSs categorically as presenting a number of unique usability challenges for users with visual impairments, a contentions supported by our ethnographic study of Facebook involving blind participants and the JAWS screen reader. Participants were most severely challenged by the process of creating and modifying user profile information and identifying other users with whom to establish relationships. The ability to decouple these activities from any single SNS using a FOAFbased cloud system may enable users to perform these activities in a more screen reader compatible (e.g. JAWS, NVDA) environment. In this paper we propose a portable profile cloud architecture based on the FOAF vocabulary and discuss the implementation of this architecture using several services of the Windows Azure cloud ecosystem. This system, as implemented, enables users to create multiple, parallel SNS-agnostic user profiles. As the system is currently constituted, these profiles can be generated with new data or information retrieved from an existing Facebook user profile. This modifiable profile and relationship information is then exported to Azure BLOB storage as an RDF file that may be accessed via a URL and may be used with any compatible system.